Monday, March 29, 2010

No matter what your primary concerns about society are -- environmental degradation, sweatshop labor, war, racism, etc. -- without foremostly addressing and scaling back the corporate police state, i.e. the prison-industrial complex, any progressive social change you are advocating for can, and will, be thwarted. This matters not if you are part of the most non-violent vegan sewing circle or if you are prepared to throw down in the streets for the dignity of humankind. Any perceived threat to the status quo, to profits and destruction, will be subjected to the evermore brazen and militarized forces of the state.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

As a chronicler of modern history, Noam Chomsky is something of an icon. The number of people he has influenced with his writing in favor of general social justice is probably beyond measure. He has highlighted things with his political writings that may otherwise not have received the attention they deserve, and I'm sure he'll be the first to admit that they still do not get all the attention they deserve. He's talking about very serious things in terms of apartheid, genocide, and war.

Unfortunately, with his latest interview, he has proven that simply being aware of many serious problems does not necessarily give you any real insight on how to effectively deal with them. And I might point out... some of the issues he brings up in passing, like environmental degradation, seem to be thrown in as a token for the effect of appearing comprehensive. On the particular subject of environmentalism, for instance, he offers nothing substantive with his suggestion that anarchists should be concerned with such issues. Unsupported by what human beings have already done, he suggests that humanity will be able to technologically engineer it's way into a more peaceful, less polluted, less devastated world. Perhaps so, but that's pretty vague, at best.

Friday, March 05, 2010

The following is a response to an article written some time back by Andrew Flood (hereafter often referred to as "the author"). The article is in circulation again on one of the social networking/bookmarking/link-sharing sites (reddit.com) which I peruse. Although this response is somewhat late, I feel it's still relevant and will remain so. I should also point out that I do not primarily identify myself as a Primitivist, but I do see much worth in the ideas of anarcho-primitivism. My response starts and continues by taking on quoted statements made in the original work by Andrew Flood: Is primitivism realistic? An anarchist reply to John Zerzan and others.

Since when was the "basic purpose" of anarchism "the creation of a free mass society?" And if that was the simplified basic purpose, why does it have to remain so? Maybe these are word games the author is playing, but a free society doesn't necessarily have to be a "mass" society and I personally could see complications arising in a mass society that was too large. This would be especially true if the mass society was constantly encroaching on bioregions and cultures that could not survive the intrusion. What does freedom really mean if your version of mass industrialism imposes itself as far and as densely populated as possible? More to do with "faith than reality" indeed.